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Work progresses on University of Ottawa’s $83 million Learning Centre

Work is progressing on schedule on the University of Ottawa’s $83 million Learning Centre.

Located at the eastern edge of the downtown core, the centre is set in the heart of the university’s main campus. The university’s website says the centre is “strategically located to frame an important gateway and a primary access point to the campus,” connecting to the city’s new east-west cycling corridor which also intersects the new Confederation Line Light Rail Transit (LRT) Campus station. The website also notes that “all of these elements speak to a new sense of environmental stewardship and heightened consciousness about sustainability issues. The project is symbolically set at the crossroads of these important global issues.”

Uniquely dedicated to student services, the centre will house 26 classrooms, all of which will be equipped with technology for hybrid teaching. Four of the classrooms have been designed for active, collaborative learning.

The classroom spaces include two 350-seat lecture halls, two classrooms able to accommodate 120 students, and the balance able to accommodate 60 each. Each classroom “will also be equipped with workstations that seat nine team members and feature video monitors, cameras, microphones and computers to facilitate teamwork, particularly in problem solving exercises,” according to uOttawa’s Gazette.

Other spaces include 20 study rooms able to hold groups of about 15 students and 800 study spaces for individual or smaller group work.

The Gazette quoted librarian Leslie Weir as saying: “Our 24/7 study spaces will support students in a wide range of digital media projects, providing digital design studios and interactive screens allowing for immersive, large scale displays. Balancing these dynamic and collaborative spaces will be quiet areas for individual reflection and concentration.”

A main floor 350-seat food court with an outdoor dining patio will also support the intent to make the centre “a meeting place for students, a place where they can eat, discuss, study and socialize.”

The centre is expected to be completed by December 2017.

Watch next month as Ottawa Construction News publishes an in-depth feature on the project, focusing on in initiatives and solutions shaping the success of this project.